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Topic: Deformed wings? (Read 1961 times)

Just did an inspection and found something odd. While I was futzing with the smoker on the ground near the hives, I saw this disabled bee crawling in the grass. She crawled up on my brush for a photo, but I'm not sure it shows that her wings were severely deformed and undersized. She couldn't fly.

Does anyone have any ideas on this? Is it possible someone has been using some pesticides nearby? Our honey production also seems drastically reduced this year. What's going on?

I also look to see if the bee is fuzzy (meaning it just emerged) or shiny (especially on it's back). Some old bees wear their wings out and they look more frayed than crumpled. Deformed Wing Virus leaves them crumpled looking and is on young bees. I can't tell for sure from your picture but they do look kind of crumpled. But I can't tell if the bee is fuzzy or not. It looks kind of shiny to me but then it may be the picture and not the bee..

DWV is a virus spread by the Varroa mites. One bee wouldn't worry me. A lot would.

David, I think this bee looks like it might be a older bee, it appears rather shiny looking, young bees are more fuzzy looking, like Michael said. Bees die basically because their wings wear out and become too frayed to fly anymore.

The virus Michael is talking about is a direct result of the varroa mite. In all honesty, check the ground around your hives and see if you see alot of bees fumbling around with bad looking wings (or even stubs of wings for that matter), see if you can ascertain the age of the bees. If they are younger looking bees, you surely have a bad mite problem.

You should perform a sticky board trap test to see where you are at with mite levels, high, low, none. Leave the sticky boards in the hives for 3 days, that is 72 hours.

This is a pretty good measurement of mite levels. The ratio for determining is mite level count goes as follows.

Insert sticky boards for 72 hours.After approximately 72 hours, count the mites (all of them on each board, do not only count one square and multiply the mites by the number of squares, that is not accurate enough)Divide the number of mites that you see by the number of hours the boards have been in the traps

This will give you the avearge daily natural mite drop count.

If you have mites, then you must treat, or face the consequence of eventual colony collapse. And believe me. It happens. I had 9 colonies collapse last year, a direct result of mite overload. My fault. I was not attentive enough, nor knew enough about the devastation that high mite levels can do to a hive.

It is important to do the sticky board 3 days to give an accurate mite count.

Good luck, you have some work ahead of you, but you must look after your girls if you want them to look after you. Have a wonderful day, best of this life. Cindi

If you want to get more information about the prorated mite detection, there is a site that explains it deeper.

There are strange things done in the midnight sun by the men who moil for gold. The Arctic trails have their secret tales that would make your blood run cold. The Northern Lights have seen queer sights, but the queerest they ever did see, what the night on the marge of Lake Lebarge, I cremated Sam McGee. Robert Service

I have the same problem, and they are not old bees. I could go out rite now and find several in front of the hive or on the frames in some of my hives. Few of my hives have 20+ of them at any given time. I have seen older bees drag them out especially in the morning because they could't do it at night when they emerged. Those those hives that have alot of them seem to have higher mite population.